About

I am a tenth generation American, descended from a family that has been working a farm that was deeded to us by William Penn. The country has changed around us but we have held true. I stand in my grandmother’s kitchen, look down the valley to her brother’s farm and see my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Hannah standing on the porch. She is holding the baby, surrounded by four other children, and saying goodbye to her husband and oldest son who are going off to fight in the Revolutionary War. The war is twenty miles away and her husband will die fighting. We are not the Daughters of the American Revolution; we were its mothers.

My father, Milton C. Woodlen, got his doctorate from Temple University in the 1940’s when—in his words—“a doctorate still meant something.” He became an education professor at West Chester State Teachers College, where my mother, Elizabeth Hope Copeland, had graduated. My mother raised four girls and one boy, of which I am the middle child. My parents are deceased and my siblings are estranged.

My fiancé, Robert H. Dobrow, was a fighter pilot in the Marine Corps. In 1974, his plane crashed, his parachute did not open, and we buried him in a cemetery on Long Island. I could say a great deal about him, or nothing; there is no middle ground. I have loved other men; Bob was my soul mate.

The single greatest determinate of who I am and what my life has been is that I inherited my father’s gene for bipolar disorder, type II. [I no longer believe that bipolar disorder is genetic. After I fully recovered from taking antidepressants, I also fully recovered from all symptoms of bipolar disorder. ACW July 2012] Associated with all bipolar disorders is executive dysfunction, a learning disability that interferes with the ability to sort and organize. Despite an I.Q. of 139, I failed twelve subjects and got expelled from high school and prep school. I attended Syracuse University and Onondaga Community College and got an associate’s degree after twenty-five years. I am nothing if not tenacious.

Gifted with intelligence, constrained by disability, and compromised by depression, my employment was limited to entry level jobs. Being female in the 1960’s meant that I did office work—billing at the university library, calling out telegrams at Western Union, and filing papers at a law firm. During one decade, I worked at about a hundred different places as a temporary secretary. I worked for hospitals, banks, manufacturers and others, including the county government. I quit the District Attorney’s Office to manage a gas station; it was more honest work.

After Bob’s death, I started taking antidepressants. Following doctor’s orders, I took them every day for twenty-six years. During that time, I attempted suicide a dozen times and was hospitalized about fifty times for a total of approximately three years. By 1991, I was unable to work, homeless, and declared fully and permanently disabled. After a severe suicide attempt in 1999, I spent a month on life support with no expectation of survival. Two years later, I was the youngest person in a large elder residence, bed-ridden and in constant despair. I had no family or friends, no money, and no church. My life was a constant stream of medications, ambulances, emergency rooms, IVs, catheters and officially approved torture by the medical industry, so I stopped taking all medications and prepared to die. Instead of dying, I began to get better. Physicians prescribing pharmaceuticals had been killing me.

I went through acute cold-turkey drug withdrawal, then a year or two of detoxification from drugs. I discovered that doctors doing drugs had so severely impaired my immune system that I no longer can take any drugs for anything. This is problematic given that I have chronic renal failure, nephrogenic diabetes insipidus, diabetes mellitus, labile hypertension, right bundle branch block, left ventricular hypertension, severe obstructive sleep apnea, celiac disease, spinal arthritis, pulmonary fibrosis, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and am hyper-reactive to all sorts of things.

I learned that the trigger for depression is the perception of powerlessness, so I began to act with power. I filed complaints with higher government agencies against lower government agencies, got the complaints investigated, and maintained pressure until there was a final resolution. As a result of my actions, employees have been fired, downgraded or transferred. Agencies have had to pay.

Centro bus company had to spend about half a million dollars on new buses.

Medical Answering Services, LLC, had to pay $80,000 back to the state.

Upgrading curb-cuts cost the City of Syracuse $72,000.

Crouse Hospital will be spending $90,000 to repair its sidewalks.

I have become an activist on behalf of God’s people—elderly, disabled, poor people, of which I am one. I ask for nothing more than the law requires. My activism is solely to get substandard housing, transportation, and other services brought up to the level required by federal law. I work for God and answer to no man.

I had been a lukewarm Christian all my life but after I stopped taking drugs, I started reading the Holy Bible. I read it through three times, then continued on to read Living Buddha, Living Christ, the Wiccan Bible, the Bhagavad Gita and the Holy Koran. I have come to understand that there is One Great Divinity, variously called Brahman, Yahweh, God or Allah. Divinity has appeared to different cultures at different times, and used different people to send what is essentially one single message: Worship me, and be kind to each other. We are called to humility and service, truth and justice.

I am sixty-seven years old now. My Social Security income is $834 per month; the federal government has me classified as “severely impoverished”. I receive Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps and HEAP. I live in a two-room, 540-square-foot, HUD-subsidized apartment, sleep in a hospital bed and travel in a power wheelchair. Home health aides are supposed to care for me every day, but I can’t get any. I have a safe apartment, healthy food, clean clothes and a warm bed. That makes me more privileged than most of the world’s people.

It is well with my soul.

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29 Responses to About

Howdy! Someone in my Myspace group shared this website with us so
I came to take a look. I’m definitely loving the information.
I’m bookmarking and will be tweeting this to
my followers! Exceptional blog and amazing design. https://vimeo.com/83675696

Howdy just wanted to give you a quick heads up. The words in your post seem to be running off the screen in Internet explorer. I’m not sure if this is a formatting issue or something to do with browser compatibility but I figured I’d post to let you know. The layout look great though! Hope you get the problem fixed soon. Thanks|

Have you ever thought about writing an ebook or guest authoring on other sites?
I have a blog based on the same subjects you discuss and would really like to have you share some stories/information.
I know my readers would appreciate your work.
If you are even remotely interested, feel free to shoot me an e mail.

Howdy! I know this is kind of off topic but I was wondering which blog platform are you using for this website?
I’m getting sick and tired of WordPress because I’ve
had issues with hackers and I’m looking at alternatives
for another platform. I would be fantastic if you could point me in the direction of a good platform.

First off I would like to say excellent blog! I had a quick question which I’d like to ask if you don’t mind.

I was interested to find out how you center yourself and clear your mind
before writing. I’ve had a hard time clearing my thoughts in getting my ideas out. I truly do enjoy writing however it just seems like the first 10 to 15 minutes are lost simply just trying to figure out how to begin. Any suggestions or hints? Appreciate it!

When I was a young boy and did not know how the internet labored, or even stood a computer, we played in the open fields together fun with one another, today it all happen online, its technology and in some way a good thing, these days it are becoming the life of several, sitting by yourself in front of the display screen feeling you have friends on the internet, its kind associated with sad, however we simply must live with this, its the so-called future…

After I initially commented I seem to have clicked on the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox and now whenever a comment is added I receive 4 emails with the same comment. Is there a way you are able to remove me from that service? Thank you.

This is the exact About | Behind the Locked Doors of Inpatient Psychiatry diary for anyone who wants to essay out out almost this topic. You mark so untold its most tiring to represent with you (not that I real would want…HaHa). You definitely put a new gyrate on a topic thats been typewritten nigh for geezerhood. Squeamish sundry, but large!

naturally like your web-site however you have to check the spelling on several of your posts. A number of them are rife with spelling issues and I in finding it very bothersome to tell the reality then again I!¦ll surely come back again. . . . BUY HYDROCODONE said this on April 11, 2012 at 7:13 pm

When I initially commented I clicked the “Notify me when new comments are added” checkbox and now each time a comment is added I get four emails with the same comment. Is there any way you can remove people from that service? Thank you!

This article made me smile. I was always at the kids table with my nine other cousins. We always have huge family reunion/holiday dinners and no matter how old we get, I think we’ll always be at the kids table, but it truly is an AWESOME place. So many memories were made at that picnic table on our grandparents’ back porch!🙂

I juts got a link to your blog from a Fb post. Thanks for putting these words out there for us to read on the other side of the world (Australia). I am a member of many communities of people living with mental health distress, & what you’ve said here resonates powerfully with some discussions we’ve had recently, while supporting each other through the latest cutbacks to our already patchy mental health care services. I’m going to start following your Blog & will share it with others in my online community. If you want to find us, a good place to start is “Alliance for Better Access” group on Facebook, also the “Australian Mental Health Human Rights Coalition”. Thanks again, & Blessings🙂 xm

Just found your blog while searching for information on Doc Breggin’s Empathic Conference.
Thanks for the information. Glad you were able to make the conference. You are not a victim of disabilities. Keep moving on!
Dominus vobiscum!

Wow. I am sooo glad I found your blog! I have a similar story and it’s from Philly. I would love to link your blog to mine. I’m new to blogging, so it may take me a bit to figure that out.

My story is on my blog, “multiple personalities don’t exist” jeanettebartha.wordpress.com From the title, you can guess the subject. lol. I have a very similar story but from a purely psychiatric venue.

I am excited to find you and will keep reading. I have been alone in my thoughts about the horrors of what amounts to medical malpractice and the power of the psychology industry.

Thanks for have the courage to write – you sure are an inspiration to me. I would like to extend an invitation to you to publish on my blog. And, I would like to reprint some from yours – of course, with permission.